A Creed in Stone Creek - Linda Lael Miller [110]
Nobody said anything.
Naturally.
Slinging the strap of her purse over one shoulder, Melissa left with a flourish.
IT HAD BEEN OVER A WEEK since he’d seen Melissa, except at a distance, and Steven did his damnedest to carry on as if nothing had changed.
Every morning, he fed Matt and the dog breakfast, made do with stale, reheated coffee himself. At night, he slept heavily, mired in mixed-up dreams he couldn’t remember two seconds after he opened his eyes, and he sure as hell didn’t feel rested—more like a wino, hung over after a three-day binge.
Quite a trick, since he hadn’t had anything to drink since before Brody left.
Leaving the tour bus that Friday morning, locking it behind him, Steven was mildly pleased to see that the renovation crew had already arrived to put in another day’s work. The barn, a nifty-looking prebuilt structure, already had walls and a roof and, by Monday, the stalls would be in, as well. He stopped to confer briefly with the foreman, who told him they were putting up drywall in the bedrooms that day, and they’d start installing the kitchen and bathroom fixtures tomorrow.
“If you don’t watch it,” Steven said, only half kidding, “you’re going to give the contracting business a good name.”
The foreman smiled at the comment, puny as it was, and informed Steven that the company was family-owned, had been in business for four generations and there had been at least one member of the clan on one crew or another from the first.
The watchword, Steven thought, was continuity. It was a way of life with most of the Creeds—the McKettricks and the O’Ballivans, too. And it was what Steven wanted for Matt, for himself, and for any descendants inclined to live out their lives on a ranch.
He hadn’t reckoned on Melissa when he’d decided to put down roots in Stone Creek, but life was full of things nobody had reckoned on, wasn’t it? A man had to do the best he could with whatever hand he was dealt, press on, take the good with the bad.
Some family histories just happened. Others were deliberately created.
Steven intended to build a dandy one, and to do that, he’d need a wife. Eventually.
Things would turn out just fine, he assured himself, while he was buckling Matt into his safety seat in the truck, as long as he stayed away from lady lawyers— Cindy aside, he’d never been able to get along with them, outside the office or the courtroom, even when they played on his team.
Insanity, the saying went, was doing the same thing over and over again and expecting to get different results.
Melissa was beautiful and funny and smart, everything he admired in a woman, but when push came to shove, she had the prosecutorial mind-set: The accused was guilty until proven innocent, not the other way around. And Steven, to the roots of his being, was all about the other way around.
Matt brought him out of his reflections with a jolt, his tone worried. “You look really sad.”
“Maybe I am a little,” Steven said, once he’d helped Zeke onto the seat, next to his pint-size master.
“Because you’re not going out on dates with Melissa anymore?”
“Partly,” Steven replied. He never lied to the boy, but he wasn’t inclined to burden a five-year-old with adult problems, either. He just wished Matt hadn’t developed a shining set of high hopes as far as the Stone Creek County prosecutor was concerned.
In Matt’s mind, Steven was sure, Melissa was on the fast track to becoming his new mommy. His drawing of the stick-people family was still taped to the refrigerator door, and he wouldn’t hear of taking it down, except to pore over it and add a detail here and there, with a pencil or a stub of crayon.
“I guess it’s grown-up stuff?” Matt asked, with a certain resignation.
Steven grinned, though he felt hollow inside. “Grownup stuff,” he confirmed. “Nothing you